The Boston Herald is ready to move from MS-DOS and homegrown
integration to 21st century fusion as the daily prepares to deploy
new print and Web content management software from Digital
Technology International.

"We're always happy to prove to people that it's possible to
produce a newspaper using 20th-century tools," Duncan Suss,
director of publishing systems for the Herald, told News &
Tech.

The Herald's newsroom is peppered with 27-year-old Atex J11
machines running software as old as MS-DOS 6.2.

"This is the first real upgrade since before I came to the
Herald 15 years ago," Suss said. "Fundamentally, we are living with
1983 Atex systems with some pagination bolted on, a lot of
homegrown glue holding the thing together and homegrown shovelware
to get things into the Web universe."

Better integrated

The new platform - expected to be operational this spring - will
be based on DTI's ContentPublisher and Lightning apps and will
allow the newsroom more transparency and integration between print
and Web. Among the benefits: editorial staff will be better able to
track and use story assets, including elements like voice and video
clips that could accompany a story online.

"Some of those assets get on BostonHerald.com but the editorial
department doesn't always know those things exist," Suss said.
"Now, even if something isn't in print, the editors will know it's
there as part of a story package."

The goal isn't to become more Web-centric, Suss said, but more
Web-enabled.

"The majority of our focus will continue to be on print, but
there are so many things we would like to do to get material onto
the Web that we can't currently do."

Suss is confident the DTI apps will result in fewer "gotchas" in
the newsroom.

"We still have instances where a story gets a little mangled
because something is paginated on a Mac, then it's exported to Atex
and it can't be re-imported so some edits are lost," he explained.
"Now the product will be better integrated."

Determining scope

The discovery and auditing phases of the project, which DTI
began last month, will help determine the scope of what will be
required by the Herald to use the DTI software. In addition to
other aspects, DTI is evaluating such factors as the Herald's
existing PC and Mac machines to determine whether or not they can
adequately support the new apps.

The Herald's impending move from its current South End offices
to an as-yet undetermined location is a key factor behind the
upgrade, Suss said. A major part of the project's ROI hinges on the
Herald unloading real estate it no longer needs since it shifted
printing of the paper to Dow Jones and Gannett Offset in September
2008.

"The intent is to relocate to an appropriately sized space vs.
our existing space, which was based on the number of people we had
five years ago," he said. "That, in and of itself, is going to
produce an ROI."

Building a cloud

DTI's cloud-based architecture, in which the apps are accessible
by redundant and remote servers, also allowed the Herald to forego
building a new communications network.

"Because we are using this system as part of our relocation
strategy, we will effectively build ourselves a cloud, which will
allow us to access it remotely from here one day and from someplace
else the next," Suss said.

To truly put the horse in front of the cart, the Herald will
first upgrade its ad platform to a "newer old" version of Atex
AdManager, version 4.55. Because the Herald is using an old version
of code on the software, the biggest leap it could make was to the
last version of AdManager that was issued before development was
officially terminated.

"As with the editorial system, the driving motivation is to
allow us to relocate seamlessly by creating a virtual environment,"
Suss said.

Although these upgrades have been a long time coming, the
Herald's had its collective eye on new systems for some 12 years -
long before relocation was a motivating factor. When the question
of moving to new offices arose, however, the major goal was to
choose a path that would enable the Herald to do so without a
hiccup in production.

"I wrote a statement of intent, which said, we are going to be
leaving this building, we will not lose a day of production - how
can your system make that happen for us?"

The process narrowed the field to four vendors and eventually to
two, although Suss admits DTI was a leading contender from the
outset.

"We really felt that they hit the nail more squarely on the
head," he said.

The printed product

The new upgrades will

have little impact on the Herald's printing arrangement.
Currently, the paper prints two-up, six nights a week at the Dow
Jones Chicopee, Mass., facility.

Gannett's Boston Offset prints the Herald's Saturday
edition.

The Herald feeds PDFs to each site and Arkitex software double
burns plates for pages containing editorial and advertising, pairs
pages and ships out the plate information to the appropriate site
for that day's production.

Suss said the Herald expects to run into some challenges as it
transitions to the new software, but anticipates few major
obstacles.

"It's an exciting time for us," he said. "The prospect of
rejoining the world of current technology is so enticing that we're
prepared to live with the pain that will surely be part of the
process."

The Herald isn't the only paper making a dramatic transition in
its content management. The San Diego Union-Tribune in January
flipped the switch on its P-Series platform from Atex, ending 140
years of manual pagination (see News & Tech, September
2009). The daily is now producing more than 420 pages per week on
the platform, Atex said.

Watch this discussion.Stop watching this discussion.

(0) comments

Welcome to the discussion.

Keep it Clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd,
racist or sexually-oriented language.PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.Don't Threaten. Threats of harming another
person will not be tolerated.Be Truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone
or anything.Be Nice. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism
that is degrading to another person.Be Proactive. Use the 'Report' link on
each comment to let us know of abusive posts.Share with Us. We'd love to hear eyewitness
accounts, the history behind an article.